President Bush passed the “Bush Tax Cuts” during his presidency to help high-income earners keep a larger percentage of their income. The tax cuts, passed in 2001 and 2003, are sent to expire soon.. and with the economic recovery looking as dire as ever, expiration is particularly controversial. Rachel explains why Republicans are pretending extending the tax cuts will help Americans.

About halfway through this clip, Rachel sits down for an interview with Austan Goolsbee, an economic adviser to the president. His argument is that we are in an economic downturn and if we increase taxes, it will cause the rich to spend less. What he seems to be ignoring though is that, we have had almost no reforms, so essentially we are just continuing on the same path with these tax cuts.

The government needs money, Goolsbee works for the government (operating at a huge deficit now).. and yet he’s saying that it’s not time to “tighten our belts”. What time do we tighten our belts exactly? One would assume in times of economic crises, where we are actually spending more money than we have and are in tremendous debts that tightening our belts would be the smart thing to do.